Education environment: sustainability timescale timespan wisdom
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 1: Have Another Hit, Babe…
Walter and Nan Simpson have an excellent piece in the Buffalo News. Here’s a bit to whet your appetite:
Earth Day is more than celebrating the little things we do to protect the environment. It’s time to look more broadly at environmental policy and take our planet’s pulse.
Are we doing enough to protect nature and endangered species and reduce air and water pollution? Are we maximizing the green jobs and public health benefits of environmental protection? Are we rapidly developing new green technologies to compete with global green export leaders like China and Germany?
Daring to answer these questions honestly is difficult. We all have our own priorities and problems. We are endlessly distracted by cellphones, computers, video games, hundreds of TV channels, advertising and shopping. We lead busy lives, detached from nature.
Few people want to be troubled by “inconvenient truths” that require significant action and sacrifice. Besides, polluting industries and their friends constantly reassure us there’s no problem. Case in point is the 1,000- pound polar bear in the room — climate change — the most serious environmental problem ever.
More like this, please. Sent April 22:
The flotsam and jetsam of our chaotic information environment can distract us from attending to the environment that really matters. While more and more people are connecting the dots between extreme weather and the burgeoning greenhouse effect, there are an awful lot of people who believe what they’ve been told: there is no crisis; it’s all a fabrication of the so-called “liberal media”; it’s all an excuse for environmentalists to raise our taxes, etc., etc., etc.
But the problem goes beyond the preening megalomaniacs of right-wing radio. The transient, helter-skelter nature of our media conveys an equally misleading message: that the 24-hour news cycle is the only one that really matters. The timespans of Earth move far more slowly; if we are to restore equilibrium to our troubled world, we must learn once again to think in the long term. There is no wisdom in a two-minute attention span.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: timescale wisdom
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 26: Go Slowly, Beloved
The Toronto Globe & Mail runs a piece by Rose Murphy that addresses long-term thinking:
Recently, David Finch, Paul Varella and David Deephouse – analyzing polling data around oil-sands development – explained that while climate change is seen as an important issue by most Canadians, it isn’t personally relevant because the most dramatic effects will not be felt until the end of this century.
I gave birth to my first child last year. According to the latest data from Statistics Canada, his life expectancy is 79; if he reaches that age, he will live until the year 2090. The normal anxiety I feel as a parent about my child’s future is heightened by what I know from a career spent considering the implications of climate change and analyzing the economic impacts of climate change policy. And for me, it couldn’t be more personal. The best information available today tells me this issue touches anyone who has a child in their life who they love. Action we take, or fail to take, right now to address climate change will profoundly affect their lives.
Well-said. I took advantage of my father’s address in Toronto to pretend a local affiliation for this letter, sent March 20:
As children, we are taught to value old things. Ancient monuments fill us with reverence, and we would never knowingly grind petrified bones into garden gravel — yet we have no qualms about using fossil fuels to power our lifestyles of convenience. The light bulbs illuminating both our productivity and our profligacy burn sunshine that once shone upon dinosaurs. If wisdom is the ability to conceive timespans longer than a single human life, it is obvious that our rapid-fire media environment needs to change if our species is to survive and prosper in the coming centuries. While the 24-hour news cycle may be keeping us “infotained,” it has failed to foster long-term thinking, which is another way of saying “sustainability.”
Nowhere is this failure more evident than in the case of climate change, a slowly-unfolding catastrophe triggered by the wasteful and thoughtless consumption patterns of our industrialized civilization.
Warren Senders